Things to do in London this weekend (August 22-23)

No London summer is complete without the Greenwich + Docklands International Festival – aka GDIF – which, as ever brings a spectacular array of gargantuan street theatre shows and spectacular installations to the streets of Greenwich and the Docklands for a couple of weeks in late summer. Running from Aug 21 at multiple venues, the 2026 theme of ‘We Move’, gets underway with 360 (Aug 21), a new work from French choreographer Mehdi Kerkouche that will turn General Gordon Square in Woolwich into a dance arena ‘where propulsive movement, immersive set design and electronic music collide in an expression of the aspirations and challenges of a generation on the edge of change’. This week also sees the Greenwich Fair (all over Greenwich, Aug 22 and 23). 

All Points East returns to Vicky Park for its eighth edition in 2026. Since debuting in 2018, the festival has garnered a reputation for building some of the most exciting line-ups in the UK. Its headliners are often indie or dance-focused big-hitters, while its undercards are packed with cult heroes and rising stars you can say you saw first. This weekend Jorja Smith and Tems will kickstart the festival on August 21 alongside Kwn, Arya Starr and Odeal. Then, Lorde will take over on August 22, along with Djo, PinkPantheress, Zara Larsson, 2hollis, Sienna Spiro and Oklou. Rock and hardcore festival Outbreak will also return for a takeover of APE in 2026, on August 23. It will be headlined by Deftones, alongside Amyl & The Sniffers, Idles and JPEGMAFIA. 

There are worse ways to spend a summer afternoon than drinking something cold beneath the trees at Thomas’ College, Richmond, while watching a succession of Shakespeare’s characters flirt, bicker and generally make a mess of love. But Tom Littler stitches Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing into one continuous romantic saga spanning the years around the Second World War. Characters cross from one play into the next, identities merge, and events in the first become emotional backstory for the second – a neat solution to Much Ado's insinuated backstory and Love's Labour's Lost's abrupt ending. Littler smooths the join between the two so seamlessly it’s nearly impossible to spot. Into this he threads contemporary asides and crowd work, which land as some of the evening's biggest laughs. The ten-strong cast play 17 roles between them; the core characters carry over. Littler has found a real case for pairing these plays: both are fascinated by ego, self-deception and the ways language protects us from intimacy. 

Johnny Boys is a good-natured attempt to bring the West Coast diner to the mean streets of Stoke Newington. Visually, it’s on point, with luminous orange tiles bringing to mind LA’s legendary Canter’s Deli and Norm’s diner, while Formica tables are tucked into cosy booths and a Coca-Cola-branded sign hangs outside. But Johnny Boys draws not just on blue jeans and Bruce Springsteen, but the Mexican and Jewish immigrant communities of southern California. Which is why the short-but-sweet menu sees taquitos, tostadas and pastrami sandwiches alongside chicken plates, patty melts and cheeseburgers. The food too hits the mark; a crab tostada is piled high with juicy meat and tastes as fresh as anything you’d score in Boyle Heights, while chunky zucchini fries with tangy ranch pay homage to those found at the Greek-run LA institution Astro Burger. If Johnny Boys weren’t so all-American, it’d be instantly worthy of classic caff status. 

There are few more striking spots to catch a movie than the iconic surrounds of the Barbican Sculpture Court. As usual, the City of London’s temple of the arts has an inventively curated line-up in store for the final week of August. On the year’s line-up is a kaleidoscopic array of films and filmmaking styles, ranging from Spike Lee concert docs to Denis Villeneuve science fiction, via the French New Wave and the best of Iranian cinema. Standard tickets are £20 (£18 concessions and £10 for under-18s) and there’s street food to feast on while you sit back, relax and enjoy the show.

Three feature films deep and it’s safe to say that Jane Schoenbrun has created a brand new subgenre of cinema. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is both a continuation of the preoccupations of their first two features and a leap into more vulnerable territory, accompanied by a dazzling step up in the sophistication of the world-within-a-world building. Schoenbrun has form in creating additional media to sit within their films as a source of nurture for protagonists wrestling with secret shames and desires. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a meta horror-comedy and a whip-smart entertainment industry satire.

This year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is curated by British sculptor Ryan Gander, who is working under the broad curatorial theme of ‘Interconnectness’. Which is just as well, given there are nearly 2,000 works that he’s chosen to fill the galleries of the London institution. The result is that there really is something here for everyone. Paintings, sculptures, paintings of sculptures, and sculptures of paintings, such as Mark Alexander’s Mother and Child rendered in quartz sand. There are woodcuts of birds by Tom Hammick, and etchings camping under a starry sky by Heidrun Rathgeb. Some prints revel in solitude like the beautiful work of Lene Bladbjerg, while others, such as Karen Keogh’s views of a French village, are rendered with a level of detail that rivals a photograph – not that this exhibition is short of those either. The Summer Exhibition rewards patience, not efficiency. Don’t book the 5pm slot; you’ll only end up having to return the following weekend. Give yourself time to wander as if you do, somewhere among the thousands of works you may discover your new favourite artist.

Magazine Open–Air is a series of outdoor shows, all backed by views of London’s skyline by the River Thames on the Greenwich Peninsula. The open-air fest aims to bring music outside, creating a roofless dancefloor framed by the surrounding cityscape. This week, catch immersive shows from electronic music DJ, record producer, and owner of the record label Lenske, Amelie Lens, back-to-back with hard techno selector Sara Landry, a takeover from German nu-disco and house record Purple Disco Machine, and RnB & Slow Jams, dedicated to classics of the genre. 

From still lifes of plump, waxy lemons to monumental saints, bloodied martyrs and ecstatic Virgins, baroque master Francisco de Zurbarán did it all. He painted vast multi-canvas scenes that once lined the walls of convents and monasteries across Spain, worked for private patrons, the court of Philip IV of Spain and clients across the Spanish Americas, where more than 100 of his paintings ended up. And now, improbably, many of them are at the National Gallery. The artist’s first UK exhibition is a chance to see more than 40 of his monumental, awe-inspiring pieces in the same room, thanks to major loans from the Louvre, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museo del Prado.

Producer JJ Abrams and writer-director David Robert Mitchell arrive with a fresh, fun spin on stompy saurian carnage. The wheeze here is that, thanks to a blissfully unexplained space-time hiccup, a sizeable chunk of 1982 middle-American suburbia is suddenly dumped in the distant prehistoric past, taking the residents on an overnight plummet several links down the food chain. Despite the full-on B-movie concept and the John Williams-style Amblin-adventure ebullience of the score, this is not some wisecracking romp. There are dark seams to mine, even before the residents of Flowervale hear the shrieks and screams outside their pointlessly locked doors. This is harsh, brutal and, at times, traumatic stuff. Though, thankfully, also entertaining enough to forgive the film’s rather cheesy coda.

Turner Prize-nominated painter Hurvin Anderson’s first major institutional show brings together more than 60 of his lively paintings, dating from 1995 when he was an art student at the Royal College of Art up to this year (some he even finished off once they’d been hung). Inspired by his experiences as a Black man of Caribbean heritage born and raised in the UK, they’re big, vibrant pieces that convey a sense of inbetweenness, or ‘being in one place but thinking about another’ as the artist puts it.

Now You See Me Live is a stage-magic spectacular. The grungy, black-wearing aesthetic and branding of the core performers – that’s Enzo Weyne, Andrew Basso, Gabriella Lester and Matthew Pomeroy – as ‘the Horsemen’ serves to give it a more focused, less cheesy vibe than some of the multi-magician West End spectaculars. And they are top-class. At best, the magic on display here is jaw-dropping. There are three tricks that are astonishing. Plus, there’s a tribute to Harry Houdini from Basso that is utterly nerve-wracking to look. Go to have your mind blown by some top-flight magicians. 

Keen to see some live music this summer but disinclined to fork out hundreds on London festival tickets? King’s Cross’s Summer Sounds festival is the perfect solution. Coal Drops Yard is once again becoming the ultimate alfresco hangout this August for its free outdoor gig series. Visitors can catch an eclectic programme of gigs encompassing everything from classical and folk music to jazz and indie rock over the eleven-day festival. This weekend, look out for a takeover from Queer Britain & Sounds Queer championing LGBTQ+ artists, plus a big party with the English Folk Dance and Song Society. You don’t even need to book, just show up  You don’t even need to book, just show up 

Matthew Bourne’s sultry dance reinvention of Carmen has returned to Sadler’s Wells in all its sweaty, grimy glory after a decade off-stage. Set in the 1950s in the fictional town of Harmony – a midwestern Italian-American community where the residents appear to be permanently horny – The Car Man’s plot mashes up Bizet’s passionate opera (it uses the Rodion Shchedrin score with additional music by Terry Davies) with the erotic noir The Postman Always Rings Twice. Packed with Bourne’s trademark theatrics, a smattering of humour, and some unforgettable performances, The Car Man is one of the choreographer’s best works. Sitting through two hours of this spicy show might leave you feeling a bit overheated, but it will be worth it. 

Cleansed starts with a syringe in the hand of the sloping, scruffy Tinker, some kind of malevolent authority figure in a psychiatric hospital-cum-prison-cum torture den, before said syringe is plunged into the eyeball of the willing Graham. It’s an infamous opening to an infamous play, steeped in the lore of its writer Sarah Kane, whose brutal and bleak dramas in the mid-Nineties redefined theatre and caused no end of controversy. You can read the sharp, shocking scenes as metaphors for Kane’s own time in a psychiatric hospital, for the nadirs of human nature that play out in war zones, for the dark dark places the human mind can go when suffering from adverse mental health. The idea is, though, that love persists, maybe, even when twisted and degraded.

Zylia is the latest from former Kiln head chef and current co-owner of Singburi Nick Molyviatis and restaurateur Barry Karacostas. The former was raised in Athens and the latter is of Cypriot heritage; Zylia is their attempt to marry the two cuisines in a splashy central London location. Both nations are present in the bread basket, with grilled and oiled Cypriot bread and Greek pita puckered with oregano. Bouncy fried balls of Greek metsovone cheese are crunchy and glistening on the outside and stringy and pliable on the inside. A wild prawn saganaki sees juicy shrimps on a tangy tomato and tahini sauce. The main event is a perfectly pink pork chop, cooked on a charcoal grill. Zylia; an effortless new addition to Covent Garden’s coterie of great restaurants. With these guys in charge, it would be strange if it wasn’t.

Dulwich Picture Gallery's big summer exhibition will be an intriguing contrast with the pastoral landscapes found in its permanent collection. Portrait of a City is all about American urban life, as documented by photographers between 1907 and 2012. It'll offer a fascinating insight into how big cities including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco grew from low-rise communities into towering assemblages of skyscrapers and multi-lane traffic. Photos from big names including Diane Arbus, Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange will chart the faces and sights of cities in flux.

The Royal Academy’s Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam, is the first major exhibition devoted to the often overlooked Victorian artist in more than 50 years. Dadd spent nearly a decade completing works like ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’ while confined to Bethlem Hospital—better known as Bedlam—after killing his father in a severe psychotic episode. In 1864, he was transferred to the newly opened Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, where he remained until his death in 1886. The exhibition, however, doesn’t begin there. Instead, it returns to Dadd’s days as a student at the Royal Academy Schools, just across from where this exhibition hangs today. While there, he became a founding member of one of Britain’s OG artistic cliques and developed his lifelong fascination with fairies, creating magical, delicate, yet dark works crammed with naughty faces and gossamer dresses. Together, these works remind us that, although Dadd’s body was confined, his imagination never was.

If you’re a mother, do you get to be a person too? A separated woman who comes out as a lesbian is torn between motherhood and selfhood, duty and freedom, in Anna Cazenave Cambet’s brutal custody drama. Love Me Tender is based on the bestselling novel by Constance Debré and inspired by Debré’s own life. Vicky Krieps plays Clémence, a make-up free, short-haired, scooter-riding ex-lawyer. Clémence has left her highly paid legal job to become a writer. She has an amicable relationship with her ex-husband Laurent and the pair share joint custody of their eight-year-old son Paul. But when Clémence tells Laurent she now dates women, he files for sole custody. What ensues is a bitter, years-long custody battle fueled by Laurent’s infuriating and borderline evil determination to take Paul away from Clémence entirely. Krieps’ superb performance expertly portrays the impossible, maddening ways society wants to define her. It’s completely compelling. 

Get sun and sand without the faff of a two-hour journey on a baking hot train this summer by heading to Walthamstow’s Big Penny Social, where the courtyard of the UK’s largest beer hall has been transformed into the Big Penny Beach Club for the warmer months. Formerly known as Walthamstow-On-Sea, the seasonal pop-up has had a bit of a glow-up for 2026, with soft golden sands, beach bars and bookable cabanas giving more Balearic than Blackhorse Road, just with more graphic design dads and fewer Wayne Lineker wannabes.

Book a private cabana to sip draught beers, Aperol spritzes and frozen cocktails served up by the beach bar, and treat yourself to some fish and chips or a scoop or two of Hackney Gelato. Amnesia has nothing on E17!

Fleabag’s Siân Clifford is raucously chaotic in Samuel Abrahams’ shrewd exhibition of eccentricity and empathy. The evocatively weird mockumentary follows Lady Isabella, a lonely, self-absorbed member of the English aristocracy, who has duped up-and-coming director Sam (Laurie Kynaston), into filming a fictional Netflix-backing project about her ‘journey of artistic discovery’. 

Cue Clifford singing disastrously on the piano, drawing Sam like a French girl and producing surrealist multimedia art all over the grounds. Kynaston plays Sam’s increasing discomfort with hilarious awkwardness. However, he is by no means an innocent bystander; the camera crew capture his own superiority complex as a filmmaker desperate to level up by exploiting the eccentric aristocrat. 

But then Abrahams and Miranda Campbell Bowling’s script becomes less of an eat-the-rich satire and more of a Charlie Kaufman-esque exercise in empathy, as the lady of the house inexplicably begins to turn invisible. With Lady, Abrahams cuts to the core of what every person, rich or poor, sane or remarkably batty, yearns for: to be seen, to be held, to be reminded that you matter – with or without an audience.

It’s not hard to see why American musical theatre powerhouse Ben Platt was attracted to the British debut of Mark Sonnenblick’s 2018 off-Broadway show. A two-hander, it’s a great vehicle for his talents as a singer and actor. But there’s more to this funny, sad and wistful piece – directed here by David Cromer. It’s New York, 1965, and Platt is Trevor, the singing half of a performing and romantic duo, alongside songwriter Arthur (Gregor Milne). It’s an era when being gay is a threat to life and livelihood. We are Trevor’s audience in smoky Greenwich Village club the Never Get as he tells – and sings – the story of their turbulent relationship and contrasting careers. He’s simultaneously charismatic and achingly vulnerable, sending a gorgeous shiver through every song or landing a wisecrack with a practised twinkle.

Canada Water’s dockside is going to be packed with (free!) cultural goings-on for six weeks this summer. As part of the new Round the Dock festival, there’s something going on every single day. Get down to the docks on a Tuesday evening and you’ll get to enjoy a spoken work and live music session from Spit Nights Poetry. On Wednesdays, feed your curiosity at a talk from pub lecture series Pints of Knowledge or on Thursdays perfect your steps at the salsa nights with Timba Britanica. South London Afro-punk collection Steam Down has curated a programme of acts to take over the floating stage every Friday while each Saturday and Sunday will see live jazz and soul performances from the likes of Mark Kavuma, Sophie Faith and Soul Sanctuary Gospel. That’s all on top of dozens of food stalls, loads of family-friendly workshops, a programme of outdoor film screenings and rotating flea markets and craft fairs. 

Can you believe we’re somehow on the fifth instalment of beloved movie series Toy Story? Well, if you're a superfan (or a clued up kid) you'll probably already be well on top of this development. So take your love of Woody, Buzz and the gang to the next level with free pop-up Bonnie’s Playtime at Westfield White City during the summer holidays

Bonnie can't remember where she's hidden her toys, and kids are invited to track them down, on a fun digital rescue mission. Head to The Disney Store and you'll also find Toy Story 5-themed area The Ranch, with crafts and products to sample and play. 

The world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, Bethlem Royal Hospital, often referred to as Bedlam, looked after several famous patients, including Victorian painter Richard Dadd. Dadd, a former Royal Academy of Schools student and established painter, suffered from delusions whilst on a Middle Eastern tour in 1843, believing the Egyptian god Osiris was influencing him. On his return home, Dadd, convinced his father was the devil, ended up killing him with a knife before fleeing to France. First detained at Bethlem and later moved to Broadmoor Hospital, where he died, he produced some of his most celebrated works, like ‘The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke' whilst incarcerated. This survey exhibition includes more than 100 works, including rarely seen sketches and paintings and a series of watercolours made on his eastern travels. 

Homer’s The Odyssey first engaged Christopher Nolan when he was attached to direct Troy, 20-odd years ago, and he’s been stealth-adapting Western literature’s foundational text ever since. Interstellar puts a time-bending spin on the story of a man trying to make it home; Inception is about trauma and homecoming; and The Dark Knight Rises sends Batman into the underworld to find his way home. So maybe The Odyssey has been the British filmmaker’s real odyssey all along. It’s a movie he could only make at this point in his career, with the full array of tools and treasure at his disposal. It’s definitely Nolan at his most formidable. The ending, one of his very best. The thunderous near-three-hours of storm-tossed seas, clashing steel, vengeful dei ex machina, awe-inspiring monsters, and Oscar-bound A-listers takes unpacking and a second viewing will bring some of the themes and textures into sharper relief. Appreciation will only grow for Ludwig Göransson’s extraordinary expressionist score, the apocalyptic glow of van Hoytema’s nocturnal lighting, and Ellen Mirojnick’s opulent costumes. The results are mythical. 

Another year, another spectacular line-up of classical music. This year, the orchestral extravaganza will feature 86 concerts across eight weeks, with over 3,000 artists taking to the stage, with the majority of the action taking place inside the grand surroundings of London’s Royal Albert Hall. There'll be the chance to hear visiting ensembles from all over the world, including The Met Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, Mahler Academy Orchestra and the Spanish National Orchestra, as well as innumerable concerts and recitals from the classical music world's biggest stars. This weekend, see star mezzo Jamie Barton join Anja Bihlmaier and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra for Mahler’s epic collision of symphony and song, plus The Chineke! Orchestra returns to the Proms with star American soprano Angel Blue. 

Battersea Power Station is adding a free summer funfair to its entertainment offering. Electric Summer is an entire seaside town’s worth of things crammed onto a Thames-side patch of concrete. The centrepiece is a full roller rink with sessions ranging from wobbly first-timers to Thursday date nights. Out on the jetty, pétanque courts turn the riverside into a passable stand-in for the south of France, river views included. There’s also a big wheel for skyline views, dodgems, a wave swinger and boardwalk games including Lobster Pot and Blockbuster.

If you thought walking up to your favourite painting in the National Gallery was as close as you could get to a masterpiece, think again. At Frameless, 42 masterpieces from 29 of the world’s most iconic artists are presented in ways never seen before, reimagined through cutting-edge technology, animation and soundscapes. Situated in Marble Arch, Frameless plays host to four unique galleries with hypnotic visuals and a dazzling score, where visitiors can enjoy 90 minutes of surreal artwork from Bosch, Dalí and more, for just £23.60.

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